Afikaris

Afikaris Contemporary Art gallery representing artists from Africa and diaspora

Boluwatife Oyediran at the Mattatuck MuseumCongratulations to  for being part of the exhibition  « About Face: 250 Years...
03/06/2026

Boluwatife Oyediran at the Mattatuck Museum

Congratulations to for being part of the exhibition  « About Face: 250 Years of American Portraits » at the Mattatuck Museum, Connecticut, USA, featuring the artwork « A Father’s Love » (2021) which recently joined the collection.

Created during a residency in Accra, Ghana, in 2021,  « A Father’s Love » depicts a man holding a child in a cotton field. Through this intimate scene, Oyediran intertwines themes of care, dignity, and familial affection with the layered histories of Black labour, resilience, and cultural inheritance embedded within the landscape. Produced prior to the artist’s move to the United States, the painting reflects his early engagement with transatlantic narratives of memory and Black experience. It also exemplifies the powerful figurative language that continues to define his practice today.

About Face: 250 Years of American Portraits, Mattatuck Museum
📆 Through August 16, 2026
📍144 West Main Street - Connecticut, United States

📷 Installation views: Courtesy of the Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury Connecticut. Photo by Julie Francois and Tanya Labeck

CURRENTLY ON VIEW | OZIOMA ONUZULIKEFor his second solo exhibition at AFIKARIS Gallery, Nigerian artist and ceramist Ozi...
28/05/2026

CURRENTLY ON VIEW | OZIOMA ONUZULIKE

For his second solo exhibition at AFIKARIS Gallery, Nigerian artist and ceramist Ozioma Onuzulike presents « Shields », a new series of wall-based sculptures that expands his long-standing exploration of the political, symbolic, and material dimensions of clay.

Produced through labor-intensive processes of crushing, hammering, grinding, and firing, the works reflect both resilience and vulnerability. The « fragile strength » of fired clay — as described by the artist — becomes a metaphor for contemporary societies shaped by political instability, environmental crisis, inequality, migration, and cultural erasure.

Rooted in the legacy of the Nsukka School while continuously reinventing the language of the medium, Onuzulike blurs the line between beauty and protection, asking: What do we defend? Who is protected? And at what cost?



Ozioma Onuzulike | Shields
📆 21 May — 8 August, 2026
📍7 rue Notre Dame de Nazareth, 75003 Paris

SEE YOU TODAY | 6—9 PMJoin us today Thursday 21 May for the opening of Ozioma Onuzulike’s solo exhibition -« Shields ». ...
21/05/2026

SEE YOU TODAY | 6—9 PM

Join us today Thursday 21 May for the opening of Ozioma Onuzulike’s solo exhibition -« Shields ».



Ozioma Onuzulike | Shields
📆 21 May — 8 August, 2026
Opening reception: Thursday 21 May | 6—9 PM
📍7 rue Notre Dane de Nazareth, 75003 Paris

| Opening Thursday 21 May | l Ozioma Onuzulike | Join us this Thursday, from 6 to 9 PM, for the opening of Ozioma Onuzul...
19/05/2026

| Opening Thursday 21 May |
l Ozioma Onuzulike |

Join us this Thursday, from 6 to 9 PM, for the opening of Ozioma Onuzulike’s second solo exhibition at the gallery — Shields.

By fashioning in clay, a tool—the shield—meant to provide protection on the metaphorical battlefield, Onuzulike exploits what he calls the material’s “fragile strength,” to gesture towards the precarious realities of the postcolonial condition. Onuzulike’s Shield Series, like his earlier ceramic garments, refers to the colonial trade in palm oil to comment upon its ramifications on the environment in Nigeria today. The differently glazed beads and buttons provide the artist with a varied visual vocabulary with which to experiment with patterns that evoke textiles, chainmail, lace, and other dress traditions that resonate with complex histories of trade, protection, prestige, and communal and familial continuity in Nigeria. Throughout his practice, the artist deftly explores the connection between the colonial history of extraction in Nigeria and contemporary political corruption. Onuzulike reminds us that colonial histories remain unfinished.

Ozioma Onuzulike | Shields
📆 21 May - 8 August, 2026
Opening reception: Thursday 21May | 6-9PM
📍7 rue Notre Dame de Nazareth, 75003 Paris

61st Venice Biennale | Democratic Republic of Congo PavillionLast week marked the opening of the 61st Venice Biennale « ...
15/05/2026

61st Venice Biennale | Democratic Republic of Congo Pavillion

Last week marked the opening of the 61st Venice Biennale « In Minor Keys » curated by Koyo Kouoh, alongside the inauguration of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s pavilion, for which Geraldine Tobe was selected.

The exhibition « Simba Moto! Seize the Fire! Saisis le feu! », curated by and presented in the Ancient Refectory of the Dominican convent of Ss. Giovanni e Paolo, brings together nine artists from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and its diaspora.

Together, they call for new narratives that, when confronted with contemporary crises, resist discourses of absence, suffering, and death. Drawing strength from ancestral worldviews, radical Congolese imaginaries of the 20th and 21st centuries, and Black liberation archives forged in the modern era and continuously engaged in dialogue with Africa, the exhibition proposes powerful new ways of imagining the present and the future.



Biennale Arte 2026
📆 9 May — 22 November, 2026
📍 Antico Refettorio - Scuola Grande di San Marco




Curator: Nadia Yala Kisukidi: 
Commissioner: Cindy Teme Makiana 
Curatorial Team: Johnny Leya .eu, Aimé Mpane .aime, Jean Kamba 
Artists: Sammy Baloji , Arlette Bashizi , Patrick Bongoy , Damso , Gosette Lubondo , Nelson Makengo , Aimé Mpane .aime, Léonard Pongo  and Géraldine Tobe 
Organizer: Ministry of Art, Culture and Heritage of the Democratic Republic of the Congo , Her Excellency Yolande Elebe Ma Ndembo, Fondation Damso 
Location: 
Graphic design: Rimasùu Studio 

📷 Credit Antoine Assumani. Courtesy of Pavillon RDCongo

We are happy to share some information about Matthew Eguavoen’s residency at .ateliers in Accra, Ghana. Eguavoen uses hi...
13/05/2026

We are happy to share some information about Matthew Eguavoen’s residency at .ateliers in Accra, Ghana.

Eguavoen uses his work to address the societal, economic, and political views across the complex intersectionality that Nigerians face in different facets of life. The constraint of societal ideology about life, on human existence and survival.
“I am inspired by human experience because it is my understanding that experience is what shape us as humans.”

dot.ateliers is an initiative founded in 2022 by Amoako Boafo dedicated to contemporary creation, experimentation, and dialogue across disciplines.


ateliers

| SAVE THE DATE |AFIKARIS Gallery is thrilled to announce Ozioma Onuzulike’s second solo exhibition in Paris - Shields -...
11/05/2026

| SAVE THE DATE |

AFIKARIS Gallery is thrilled to announce Ozioma Onuzulike’s second solo exhibition in Paris - Shields - opening on Thursday May 21st.

With this new series of works Onuzulike reimagines the shield not as an instrument of war, but as a powerful metaphor for resilience, memory, and collective survival. Using ceramic palm kernel shell beads, chain-mail structures, copper wire, and lace-imprinted buttons, the artist transforms fragile materials into forms of protection that speak to the complexities of our contemporary world. Balancing vulnerability and strength, adornment and armour, « Shields » becomes a space where craft bears witness and beauty itself becomes an act of resistance.

Ozioma Onuzulike | Shields
📆 21 May - 8 August, 2026
📍7 rue Notre Dame de Nazareth, 75003 Paris

07/05/2026

| FINAL DAYS |

Mohamed Saïd Chair’s solo exhibition —Out of the Shadows— is entering its final days and will close this Saturday, May 9. Don’t miss the opportunity to see it and plan now your visit to the gallery!

*The gallery will be closed tomorrow Friday May 8, due to the bank holiday, but will be open on Saturday.

Mohamed Saïd Chair | Out of the Shadows
📆 Until 9 May, 2026
📍7 rue Notre Dame de Nazareth, 75003 Paris



ART BRUSSELS | BOOTH 5A-26In the series « Behind a Flag », the portraits on jute bags by Jean David Nkot are now deploye...
25/04/2026

ART BRUSSELS | BOOTH 5A-26

In the series « Behind a Flag », the portraits on jute bags by Jean David Nkot are now deployed on textiles reminiscent of flags. Inspired by strip-weaving traditions from West and Central Africa, these textiles are dyed in colors associated with national flags, without referencing any specific country.

The aim is not to represent a flag, but to question what it embodies: a symbol of power, identity, and collective narrative. The screen-printed backgrounds combine archival and contemporary images with fragments of text drawn from the Harkin-Engel Protocol—an agreement by the chocolate industry to comply with the Convention on the Worst Forms of Child Labour (ILO, 1999). Deliberately rendered barely legible, these inscriptions point to the opacity of such international agreements and the persistence of invisible forms of exploitation.

📷 Jean David Nkot
www.//Behind a flag.cm, 2026
Mixed media (silkscreen printing, sewing, collage, and acrylic on jute bag and woven fabric)
140x182 cm / 55x72 in



AFIKARIS Gallery | Booth 5A-26
📆 23—26 April, 2026
📍Brussels Expo – Entrance Hall 5 - Place de la Belgique 1, 1020 Brussels



NOW OPEN | ART BRUSSELSWe are waiting for you at Booth 5A-26 to present you the works by Jean David Nkot! •AFIKARIS Gall...
23/04/2026

NOW OPEN | ART BRUSSELS

We are waiting for you at Booth 5A-26 to present you the works by Jean David Nkot!



AFIKARIS Gallery | Booth 5A-26
📆 23—26 April, 2026
📍Brussels Expo – Entrance Hall 5 - Place de la Belgique 1, 1020 Brussels



📷 Exhibition views ©Gabriele Abbruzzeseabbruzzese



Adresse

7 Rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth
Paris
75003

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Samedi 11:00 - 19:00

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